We Tried OpenAI’s New Agent—Here’s What We Found

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Today, OpenAI announced Operator, a new research preview of ChatGPT that acts as an agent for your repetitive tasks. It can autonomously perform actions for you like shopping for airline tickets, making restaurant reservations, buying flowers and more. 

Operator has access to its own browser, and you can watch it navigate the web in real time—and it allows you to step in to take control whenever you want. Unlike previous web-browsing experiences inside of ChatGPT, Operator is designed to handle tasks end-to-end rather than requiring your input in between.

OpenAI gave Every early access to Operator this week and we’ve been putting it through its paces. Here’s what we found.

A tour of Operator—how it works

Operator’s home screen—which lives on operator.chatgpt.com instead of inside of ChatGPT—looks a lot like vanilla ChatGPT with one key difference. ChatGPT usually greets you with the message, “What can I help you with?”

Instead, Operator greets users with, “What can I help you do?” The difference is slight, but revealing: It’s very much concerned with getting work done—and it’s not as much of a general-purpose tool as ChatGPT proper is (at least for now).

Source: Images courtesy of OpenAI.

You can ask Operator to do whatever you want but, below the fold, Operator shows suggested tasks that it can perform for you on some of OpenAI’s partner sites. For example, it suggests finding four tickets to a Kendrick Lamar concert, or researching dinner recipes that take less than 30 minutes and involve chicken.

If you query Operator by, for example, typing, “Find out where Jamie XX has shows scheduled and how much tickets are for each,” you’ll be able to watch it search the web for concerts, and click through StubHub until it completes your task:

At any point, you can take control of its remote browser and nudge it along—for example, to enter in a username and password. If you ask it to, it will also save important account details so, if you log in once, it can take action inside of your accounts without bothering you again.

Eventually Operator will end up at a checkout page and return to you for payment details:

When Operator works, it can take a task that would normally take 15–20 minutes of clicking around and do it for you automatically. It’s a window into the future of how we will all be interacting with software in the coming months and years.

One of the coolest parts of Operator is its saving and sharing feature. Once it has finished a task, Operator makes it easy to save a workflow—like updating a spreadsheet with the latest sales numbers—and rerun it again. It even provides a sleek video of its session that you can watch and share with other people.

You can imagine building up a library of these Operator workflows over time that will automatically do a lot of your repetitive tasks for you—according to your preferences. It might make common chores like buying your weekly groceries or finding a flight that fits your exact preferences much easier.

Operator is a research preview, though, so it’s not perfect. Here’s some of the ups and downs that we noticed in our testing.

What we noticed while diving deeper

Operator is limited in what it can browse

One of the peculiarities of Operator’s design is that it doesn’t use your browser. Instead, it uses a browser in one of OpenAI’s data centers that you can watch and interact with remotely. The upside of this design decision is that you can use Operator wherever and whenever—for example, on any mobile device.

The downside is that many sites like Reddit already block AI agents from browsing so they can’t be accessed by Operator. In this research preview mode, Operator is also blocked by OpenAI from accessing certain resource-intensive sites like Figma or competitor-owned sites like YouTube for performance or legal reasons. 

Operator is often stuck in a frustrating glass case—it can’t use all of its powers because it’s hemmed in: